


Letters from Quarantine

by lirin



Category: Oxford Time Travel Universe - Connie Willis
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-31
Updated: 2016-08-31
Packaged: 2018-08-12 04:53:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,179
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7921282
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lirin/pseuds/lirin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Returning to the present doesn't mean what happened is over or forgotten. Kivrin hides in her room...but Colin is there for her right outside the door.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Letters from Quarantine

**Author's Note:**

  * For [DesertVixen](https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesertVixen/gifts).



> Thanks very much to my beta drayton, who always makes my stories so much better than they were before.

_16 January 2055_

_To the boy who helped rescue me—_

_For a lively young person like you, being stuck in quarantine must be a great frustration in and of itself. For your only companions to be two antisocial near-invalids like Mr. Dunworthy and myself must make it even more galling._

_For a while, I feigned interest in your chatter about the Crusades and London, all the adventures you have had and have yet to have—and it was interesting, but exhausting. So now I’m hiding in my room, trying to avoid having to talk to anybody any more; and to accomplish that, I find myself writing you a letter. There’s irony in that somewhere, but I don’t think I particularly care. I’ll just call this a coping mechanism. After all, the therapists said that I shouldn’t expect to do everything the way I used to, that my concept of “normal” has changed. I’m not going crazy talking to myself because I’m not talking to myself. This is a letter to you, just like the Domesday Book was addressed to Mr. Dunworthy so I wasn’t talking to myself then either._

_You seem to be already bouncing back from the horrors that we’ve seen, either because you did not fully comprehend them, or because you did not experience as many of those horrors as Mr. Dunworthy and I did. I’m sorry—I don’t mean to minimize your losses. I’m very sorry about the death of your great-aunt. But still, you seem full of life while Mr. Dunworthy and I are—empty? It’s hard to say; I’m just so tired. I want nothing more than to sit here and stare at a wall for hours, remembering Father Roche and Rosemund and Agnes and all the others until they fade into numbness and I remember nothing at all._

_But I have a feeling the therapists wouldn’t approve of that. Hence, writing a letter instead._

_Rosemund was about your age. Just a child like you, yet already expected to marry soon and have a family. But that never happened. She died childless and alone. Her family all died before her, and I wasn’t even looking at her when she died. She had been getting better! She wasn’t supposed to die._

_I must admit, I can’t recall your name. I suppose you told me, or Mr. Dunworthy did, but I don’t remember. I barely understood modern English when you two caught up with me. Perhaps I still don’t, and this letter is actually written in some hodgepodge of fourteenth century English that I only think actually makes sense._

_But I digress again. I actually did enjoy your tales of running all over Oxford trying to get through the quarantine line. Perhaps if we tire of this place, you can be my knight in shining armor (you’d like that, right? Because it’s like something out of the Crusades?) and break me out of here with a well-timed stinkbomb, or by tripping the guards with your stickiest gobstopper, and lots of running afterwards. That seemed to be the overarching theme of your stories—lots of running. Alas, my ribs hurt too much for me even to walk much, so I shall remain here for the present. It’s just as well; if we have carried any disease back with us, I’d hate to be responsible for passing it on._

_And now, with all the indomitability of youth, you are knocking on my door again, asking me to come out and play. Or rather, to come join you and Mr. Dunworthy for dinner, but you seem as thrilled about it as if it were something fun and exciting. It’s hard to say no to that joy, so I suppose I must join you. Perhaps I will ask you how you would break out of here if you had to. All hypothetical, of course._

* * *

The letters were hard to read, not just from the words on the page (though some of those were painful enough) but from the memories that came flooding back with them, softened by time but still sharp enough to sting. Reaching the end of a page, Kivrin looked up. There were voices in the corridor. She welcomed the distraction, telling herself she needed to figure out what they were saying in case it was important. She wasn’t just grasping for an excuse to stop reading. That would be foolish.

“D’you know if Kivrin’s around?” A man’s voice, unfamiliar.

“Professor Engle is in her office, I believe.” The administrative assistant, holding down the fort as usual.

“Apocalyptic! Thanks. Oh also, do you have an access code for the xerolaser?”

“Certainly, it’s just…”

The voices drifted away. Mundane and unimportant, Kivrin decided. There was nothing to keep her from moving on to the next letter.

* * *

_17 January 2055_

_Dear Colin,_

_As you can see (or rather, as you would see if I ever gave you this letter to read, which I don’t plan to), I have managed to learn your name. I even guided the conversation in such a way that I don’t think you realized I didn’t already know it. Mr. Dunworthy probably guessed, though; he’s quite astute._

_I was impressed by how much you already know about the Crusades. That’s the most important thing you can do at your age towards becoming an historian: develop a passionate interest in the subject, and an ability to learn lots of facts and make connections. Teachers in your future can help you build a mental framework to organize those facts, but they can’t provide the passion for history that you and I already have._

_I could have listened to you telling me random facts about the Crusades for a long time, believe it or not. Yes, I already knew much of what you were telling me, but I’m getting used to hearing you talk, and you’re a decent story-teller. Certainly much more entertaining than the invasion of doctors that interrupted us._

_You must have seen so many doctors these last few weeks. I could tell from the way you scarcely paid attention to them but predicted their every request, sticking out your tongue almost before they asked for it. (Then again, it’s not often you run into people who actually want you to stick your tongue out at them, so I’m sure you were making the most of it.)_

_For me, it was the opposite; after months in a time without doctors, I found the routine unfamiliar. It was welcome, however. The worst part for me of being in 1348 was not having proper medicine. The people I loved who died then could have lived if they had been born in our century._

* * *

The voices were back, and Kivrin welcomed another excuse to set her reading aside. Presumably the man had made his xerolaser copies and had now come back to look for her. A tap at her door confirmed this theory.

“Kivrin?”

“Colin!” she exclaimed. She hadn’t seen him in months, since he’d left for his latest assignment in the 15th century. “I didn’t recognize you with your voice all different. Language and Accent implant not worn off yet?”

Colin grinned. “Is it that bad? Pols claimed she recognized my voice easily when I called her, but I have a feeling she was trying to assuage my vanity.”

“I didn’t know you had vanity to be assuaged,” Kivrin teased. “How was your drop?”

“Lots of manual labor, which wasn’t fun. I met some kind people though. It wasn’t any easier to leave than it ever is, but...at least nobody was in poor health and their village seemed to be thriving. So that helped.” He flipped aimlessly through the papers he was holding, then tapped the stack on her desk to even the edges—the adult-Colin equivalent, Kivrin suspected, of inspecting his gobstopper. “How about you? When I saw you before I left, you were looking into taking a sabbatical to do another Medieval drop. Did anything come of that?”

Kivrin shook her head. “I’ve decided three drops was enough. I had the first where everything went wrong, a second to convince myself I was capable of time travel without a disaster, and the last simply to do research. What purpose would a fourth serve?”

Colin looked at her for several seconds without saying anything, then offered, "More research?"

"I have more than enough material from what I've already done," Kivrin said. "Especially since my students keep me so busy that I never seem to have time to write." The thought of writing reminded Kivrin of the letters she'd been reviewing; quickly, she swept them into the nearest drawer. Bad enough for her to dwell on those memories without pushing them on Colin as well, as she’d be forced to do if he spotted his name. If only she could get over her silly habit of addressing her research notes to other people—the quarantine letters to Colin, the Domesday Book to Mr. Dunworthy—it would be simpler. And more fair to others, since despite appearances, she considered those notes hers alone.

"Florin for your thoughts?" Colin said, and Kivrin realized she'd been distracted for longer than was polite.

"I really don't feel a need to time travel any more, Colin," she said, reminding herself to smile. "I was lucky to be the first visitor to the Middle Ages, and I was lucky to be allowed to time travel again after the disaster that turned into, and now I'm lucky to have a good job training talented students. I'm happy here. I'm not jealous of those who choose to travel into the past, but neither am I afraid of what can be found there."

"I'm glad you're happy," Colin said. "You're where I see myself someday...teaching students and writing up my research. I think if I get married and start a family, that might be what finally pushes me to stop travelling to the past."

“It’s always the people we care about,” Kivrin said. “That’s why I stopped, because I couldn’t stand to fall in love with any more people. Not romantic love, I mean—”

“I know what you mean,” Colin said, and of course he did. He was an historian.

* * *

_Sometimes I think Mr. Dunworthy blames himself for what happened. But if anyone is least to blame, he is. I was the one who insisted on going to the Middle Ages. Latimer was my official tutor; Gilchrist was the one who pushed for the Middle Ages to be prematurely opened to time travel. We were all so eager to send an historian to the 14th century, while Mr. Dunworthy was vehemently opposed. He had no particular reason to feel responsible for me at all, yet he threw himself into the past—knowing, unlike me, that he was headed for the Black Death—to rescue me._

_Even if the whole thing were his fault...even if he’d personally decided that I should go to the Middle Ages, and opened the net to send me there with his own hands...that retrieval would expiate it all. He came for me when nobody else was there, and so did you. You may not have realized the seriousness of your actions when you followed him, but that doesn’t change how much your desire for an adventure affected me. I don’t think Mr. Dunworthy would have made it without your help, Colin, so thank you for rescuing us both._

_After you went to bed last night, I sat with Mr. Dunworthy for a long time. He’s very restful to be around: good at listening when I want to talk, and content to sit in silence when I don’t. He tells me he believes I’ll go on another drop someday, although I can’t imagine doing so. When I was your age, all I dreamed of was becoming an historian and visiting the past. Back then, I thought the difficult part would be coping with all the differences—language, clothing, food, customs, other things I knew I wouldn’t think of until I arrived—but arduous as that is, it’s nothing to how hard it is to leave the past in the past. Mr. Dunworthy says that’s always the way it is, even when the contemps don’t die on you. That dealing with that is just as much a part of being an historian as reading tax rolls and having an interpreter implanted._

_Someday, you’ll know all this from experience and not just from being told by me or Mr. Dunworthy. Someday, even though you’ll have been warned off by every historian you come across, you’ll ignore their warnings (just as I did) and travel into history. Someday, you’ll meet wonderful people in the past, come to love them as they include you in their lives, and then leave them behind. Someday, you’ll return to 21st-century Oxford, think back on your journey with bittersweet fondness, and then settle down to write up your research without having to worry that reflection on your experiences would be too painful to contemplate._

_Someday, perhaps I will too._


End file.
